Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 31, 2004
It is also cutting into provincial expenditure on health and education.
Welfare grants will swallow R20.8-billion of the R50-billion that Manuel was able this week to add to the spending programme for the next three years. There are plans to raise the ceiling for child grants from 10 to - up to and including - 13 years during the Medium Term Economic Framework period to 2008.
Two million people were added to the beneficiary lists for various grants between April and September this year alone, pushing the total number of recipients to nine million - about one in five of the total population.
Much of the increase was in the unexplained escalation in disability and foster care grants, which Manuel said reflected an unknown but probably vast level of maladministration.
"In the disability grant arena, there is very, very severe abuse," Manuel said, after he had sounded a first warning in an address to Parliament on Tuesday.
He said that in some provinces, officials were adding applicants to the list without any checks, families were registering their own children as foster children and government officials were illegally claiming child care support for their own children.
"It just destroys the entire fabric of the system of care in our country. We just have to take them out and not apologise when we do it," he added.
The government has no figures on the number of people claiming disability grants as a result of HIV/Aids and no firm guidelines on their eligibility.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said this week the Cabinet had rejected a draft definition of disability. The key would be in defining it as a condition reached after all possible medical intervention failed.
Welfare grant administration will be shifted to a national social welfare agency in 2006, but Manuel moved this week to limit the collateral damage to other services by shifting welfare funds from the equitable share paid to provinces to the conditional grants that go to these regional governments.
Ismail Momoniat, deputy director-general for Intergovernmental Affairs, told Business Times that the technical change would mean that, though distribution would remain a provincial responsibility until March 2006, responsibility for overruns would move to the national department.
At present, welfare claims take precedence over other provincial expenditure. Provinces have had to cut back on critical health and education budgets or have taken out bank overdrafts to pay welfare grants expected to total R38.4-billion in the current financial year, rising to R47-billion in the 2007/08 fiscal year.
In the financial year to March 2004, Northern Cape overspent on welfare grants by 8.6%, KwaZulu-Natal by 7.2%, Eastern Cape by 7.7% and Gauteng by 4.1%. Western Cape and North West underspent.
Manuel said in an interview that shifting the responsibility to the national Department of Social Welfare next year should insulate other services against the impact of soaring welfare payments.
But he added: "There is a notion in social development at provincial level that fiscal responsibility is somebody else's baby, not theirs. That needs to be fixed."
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